What I like most about it is that through the social media seeding, and sales through Eventbrite you had a pretty controlled environment for your experiment, allowing you to measure ROI effectively, and less ambiguously than many others are doing.

Measurement of any campaign depends on success against objectives – if the objective is reach, and sometimes it is, then fine, delivery metrics are what you need. If the success is based on revenue or footfall, then measure that.

The problem comes in the greyer areas, like for films, for example. There are so many determinants of a film’s performance (quality of the film, stars, other media activity, other films out that week, other events on that week etc), so you need to find proxies to measure against instead for that part of the campaign. & If these are the problems with films, just think of the problems you’ve got with cars!

I’ve seen various models of this sort of measurement using proxies, assigning values to blog posts, re-tweets etc, and some of these are persuasive, but it’s really all about having clear campaign objectives and then a way to measure against that.

In your case it was a local, short term revenue and footfall goal, and from your results you definitely acheived ROI on that!

Monika Lorincz
monika@surchur.com
http://surchur.com/
Blog: http://blog.surchur.com/
Twitter: @surchur

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Mahalo for sharing your process and successful campaign with us!